It’s not Flower Mart without lemon sticks. (Very) fresh milk, tea once shared bill.
Years before big league baseball returned to the city or school children planted the cherry trees whose blooms beautify Fort McHenry, another rite of Baltimore spring was already well established: Indulging in a lemon stick at Flower Mart, whose 2024 incarnation is underway. A peppermint stick set like a straw into the cut side of a lemon, the simple sweet and sour treat has changed little since being introduced to the festival in the 1920s. While the stick has stuck, some of the food or drink offerings it outlived are harder to envision today.
Milk as fresh as you can get
Beginning in 1920, the dairy industry and researchers had a “Tale of the Cow” exhibit at Flower Mart to extol what they said were the health benefits and affordability of dairy products. Among its advice, according to a May 10, 1920, Sun article: Serve butter with every meal. Eat ice cream up to five times a week. The following year the exhibitors planned to bring multiple live cows to Mt. Vernon Square, including one that was to be “milked whenever a Flower Mart visitor thirsty enough to like milk with the middleman eliminated happens along,” The Sun wrote on May 11, 1921. At later Flower Marts, the demo was done with a mechanical cow, but the festival long offered fresh milk, buttermilk and cheeses.
Tea in fantastic and fantastical settings
Tea drinking customs shaped the schedule and footprint of early Flower Marts, which coincided with a proliferation of tea rooms in the U.S. amid a movement for women’s rights, the rise of the automobile, and Prohibition. Through the years festival goers sipped within a “picturesque tea house,” a tea garden within the Washington Monument grounds and a Parisian cafe on the square, according to Sun coverage. In 1934, the setting sounded fantastical, when it was written that dancers performing the Mad Hatter’s tea party scene from “Alice in Wonderland” drank with guests.
Saving butter and sugar, teaching vegetarianism and canning, and selling candy and cigarettes during World War II
There were no gatherings for Flower Mart in 1917 and 1918 during World War I or during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021, but the event rolled on during World War II with adjustments to accommodate and support the war effort. In 1945, the final year of the war, organizers saved up sugar and butter for weeks as rationing limited the sweets and sandwiches that could be offered. A couple years earlier, in an interview with The Sun, a vendor selling fragrant flowers and ration book covers acknowledged the tension between the celebration and sacrifice, though apparently did not offer commentary on the costumed girls who sold cigarettes and candy. Victory gardens were an emphasis, and exhibits on vegetarianism and canning appeared.
Have a story idea about Baltimore or Maryland history or a question that might lead to one? Email researcher Paul McCardell at pmccardell@baltsun.com.
